Month: May 2024

Enlarge / Many different Apple stickers from many different products and eras. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

As a noted sticker enthusiast, I’m always on the lookout for news at the intersection of stickers and technology. Which is why this report from 9to5Mac caught my eye: Apple is apparently starting to wind down its decades-long practice of including Apple logo stickers in the box with all of its products.

If you buy a new iPad Air or iPad Pro, you’ll be able to get some stickers if you ask the people at the Apple Store to include them (stores will get a “limited quantity” of stickers they can distribute on request). But the little sticker insert that has come with Macs, iPods, iPhones, iPads, and other devices and accessories for as long as I can remember will stop being one of the default pack-ins.

Apple is apparently cutting down on its sticker distribution to help meet its environmental goals. The stickers are some of the last bits of plastic included in most modern Apple packaging; in recent years, even the plastic backing layer for the stickers has been replaced with wax paper instead. This happened around the same time that the inner layer of packaging wrapped around new Apple devices also shifted from plastic to paper and when plastic-sealed boxes gave way to tear-away paper adhesive strips.

Enlarge / Ripton, VT - July 16, 2023: Ethan Poploski stood in front of his family's home, which had been destroyed by a landslide overnight. (credit: Boston Globe / Contributor | Boston Globe)

Vermont may soon become the first state to force fossil fuel companies to pay their fair share to cover recovery efforts from climate change damages. This week, the state's potentially groundbreaking law passed a preliminary vote in the Senate, where a final vote is expected soon that would likely send the law to the governor's desk. And there's reportedly broad enough support to override any attempt to veto the law.

By passing a law that mimics the Environmental Protection Agency’s Superfund program—which "forces the parties responsible for the contamination" of lands "to either perform cleanups or reimburse the government for EPA-led cleanup work"—Vermont hopes to create a Climate Superfund Cost Recovery Program.

If enacted, the law could end up costing fossil fuel companies billions for climate damages in Vermont alone and serve as a model for other states similarly seeking to combat their worst impacts.

Enlarge / Elon Musk, in Paris, France, on Friday, June 16, 2023. Musk predicted his Neuralink Corp. would carry out its first brain implant later that year. The first implantation took place in January 2024. (credit: Getty | Nathan Laine)

The first invasive brain chip that Neuralink embedded into a human brain has malfunctioned, with neuron-surveilling threads appearing to have become dislodged from the participant's brain, the company revealed in a blog post Wednesday.

It's unclear what caused the threads to become "retracted" from the brain, how many have retracted, or if the displaced threads pose a safety risk. Neuralink, the brain-computer interface startup run by controversial billionaire Elon Musk, did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Ars. The company said in its blog post that the problem began in late February, but it has since been able to compensate for the lost data to some extent by modifying its algorithm.

Neuralink touts that its invasive implant includes 64 flexible threads carrying a total of 1,024 electrodes that can detect neuronal activity. Those flexible threads—described as thinner than a human hair—are inserted individually into the brain by the company's proprietary surgical robot. The goal is for the threads to be placed near neurons of interest so that signals detected by the electrodes can be recorded and decoded into intended actions, such as moving a cursor on a computer screen.

Enlarge / Streaming services are assembling... into a bundled package. (credit: Marvel Entertainment/YouTube)

Sometime this summer, US customers will be able to buy a subscription to Max, Disney+, and Hulu together for a discounted price. The Wednesday announcement from respective owners Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD) and Disney comes as the streaming industry combats a competitive subscription marketplace burdened by constant cancellations.

WBD and Disney didn't provide a specific release date for the package but said that people will be able to buy it from "any of the three streaming platform’s websites offered as both an ad-supported and ad-free plan.”

The companies didn't confirm a price, but the bundle should be cheaper than all three services combined, which would start at $47.97 per month for no ads and $25.97/month with ads.

Enlarge / A screenshot of the Apple iPad ad. (credit: Apple via YouTube)

An advert by Apple for its new iPad tablet showing musical instruments, artistic tools, and games being crushed by a giant hydraulic press has been attacked for cultural insensitivity in an online backlash.

The one-minute video was launched by Apple chief executive Tim Cook to support its new range of iPads, the first time that the US tech giant has overhauled the range for two years as it seeks to reverse faltering sales.

The campaign—soundtracked by Sonny and Cher’s 1971 hit All I Ever Need Is You—is designed to show how much Apple has been able to squeeze into the thinner tablet. The ad was produced in-house by Apple’s creative team, according to trade press reports.

Enlarge / The Orion spacecraft after splashdown in the Pacific Ocean at the end of the Artemis I mission. (credit: NASA)

NASA has asked a panel of outside experts to review the agency's investigation into the unexpected loss of material from the heat shield of the Orion spacecraft on a test flight in 2022.

Chunks of charred material cracked and chipped away from Orion's heat shield during reentry at the end of the 25-day unpiloted Artemis I mission in December 2022. Engineers inspecting the capsule after the flight found more than 100 locations where the stresses of reentry stripped away pieces of the heat shield as temperatures built up to 5,000° Fahrenheit.

This was the most significant discovery on the Artemis I, an unpiloted test flight that took the Orion capsule around the Moon for the first time. The next mission in NASA's Artemis program, Artemis II, is scheduled for launch late next year on a test flight to send four astronauts around the far side of the Moon.

Enlarge (credit: themotioncloud/Getty Images)

Ethan Zuckerman wants to release a tool that would allow Facebook users to control what appears in their newsfeeds. His privacy-friendly browser extension, Unfollow Everything 2.0, is designed to essentially give users a switch to turn the newsfeed on and off whenever they want, providing a way to eliminate or curate the feed.

Ethan Zuckerman, a professor at University of Massachusetts Amherst, is suing Meta to release a tool allowing users to "unfollow everything" on Facebook.

The tool is nearly ready to be released, Zuckerman told Ars, but the University of Massachusetts Amherst associate professor is afraid that Facebook owner Meta might threaten legal action if he goes ahead. And his fears appear well-founded. In 2021, Meta sent a cease-and-desist letter to the creator of the original Unfollow Everything, Louis Barclay, leading that developer to shut down his tool after thousands of Facebook users had eagerly downloaded it.

Zuckerman is suing Meta, asking a US district court in California to invalidate Meta's past arguments against developers like Barclay and rule that Meta would have no grounds to sue if he released his tool.